


Where the Nightmares Sleep

by fuckener



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Different Universes, Drabble Collection, F/F, F/M, M/M, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-16
Updated: 2013-09-29
Packaged: 2017-12-26 18:21:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/968815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fuckener/pseuds/fuckener
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of drabbles about stupid kids and their one-sided infatuations.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Kanaya and Vriska

Blue dye is smeared across Kanaya’s custom silk pillow covers when she wakes up. They’re new, and she knows, resignedly, they’re stained for good. It doesn’t bother her enough. She rolls across the mattress and breathes in the concentrated spot, deep dark navy bled into jade fabric and holds the scent in swollen lungs.

Vriska is, almost surprisingly, still present, lounging across the couch in the next room over in only her panties and Kanaya’s pyjama shirt. “Finally!” she says when Kanaya appears, and her hair is electric blue under the stark apartment lights. She’s all jutting bones and hard angles and Kanaya knows just from looking her skin would be cold to the touch - always is, enough so that the brush of their fingers feels like reaching into an open flame.

Kanaya feels encased in burns and sores and weakened black skin when they’re together and sits tensely, letting herself cook, waiting, hopefully, to be devoured. Alone, she is only cremated pieces of herself, and in her overwhelming sadness still feels unappealingly charred, spoiled.

“So!” Vriska’s thin limbs come to life all at once, spidery and long and eerily coordinated. Her eyes are black behind her glasses and she grins wide and with her two rows teeth visibly squeezed together. Skinny fingers drag through her long blue hair, and Kanaya imagines it soft in her own hands, sliding out of her reverent hold in a brief shimmer of reflected light. 

The smile Vriska gives her is knowing and cruel. “What do you think?”

Beautiful, Kanaya thinks, and the dried up remnants of her heart burn agonizingly to life.


	2. Roxy and Jane

The second night of the con, Roxy feels like nothing but background, a useless additional fixture to more important happenings - more important people. At least she’s got company.

“The matching costumes idea has been effectively rendered a huge waste of time,” Dirk says, flatly. He lifts his impressively well crafted Buster Sword up to rest on his shoulder and blinks his contact-blue eyes. Somewhere out there, in the ever-expanding ocean of people surrounding them, his Zack Fair is monopolizing all of Roxy’s precious time with her vampire queen.

She sighs with cartoonish exasperation, and she doesn’t even know why she pretends in front of Dirk that it doesn’t have a deep effect on her, that their first meeting all together going like this: for months she’d gushed to Jane about how excited she was for them to meet, to share their hotel room and buy stupid merchandise for each other, with each other, and Jane had reciprocated enough and then moved on to the pressing matter of real-life Jake English. For all Roxy loves him, she’s tired of the sound of his name, of being faced by the obnoxiously adoring blue letters of it every day.

Most of all, she’s tired of how easily people fall in love with him. Dirk, at her side, curls his equally disappointed fingers around hers. A boy who’d have Dirk’s heart by asking alone is not one Roxy thinks she’s any competition for.

It’ll kill her when they come into her line of vision, Jake’s hand swinging in the one she’s spent the last year fantasizing about reaching for, being looked at with that smile that turns Roxy cold and sore with jealousy, heartache, love.

It’ll kill her, but for now she’ll rest her head on the comforting plane of Dirk’s shoulder and shut her eyes and pretend she’s still got a shot.

“Couple’a stupid kids,” she says, not entirely sure who she means, and Dirk snorts and lowers his head slightly to touch hers.


	3. Dave and Karkat

There’s a framed picture of Jesus on Karkat’s bedside table his mom checks is still there every time she passes by his room. It creeps Dave the fuck out, being looked at by those judgemental baby blues - plus, he doesn’t get white Jesus, especially in the house of Karkat’s very non-white family, who must get that the guy grew up in Palestine and not fucking LA.

“You think I like being constantly stared down by white Jesus?” Karkat asks, brows drawn. He points a finger at it, and Jesus’ sympathetic stare suddenly, magically looks slightly disappointed. “I have to change in the toilet because I’m too creeped out to get my dick out in my own room, like two-dimensional Jesus won’t like the reality of the penis he stuck on me. Like this picture of Jesus has any fucking awareness. You know how much growing up with this boundless supply of shame next to me screwed me up? Masturbating to completion is rarely even fucking possible.”

Dave huffs out a laugh, presses his face into the curve of Karkat’s jaw. “I’m sort of getting the feeling that will be an issue in the immediate future - by which I mean two minutes when I have you about to cream your jeans.” Beneath him, Karkat’s kick connects briefly with his shin. “Can’t we just turn Jesus to the wall? I mean shit, maybe my brother’s a creepy pain in the ass but it’s better fooling around worrying that he’ll chuck sexualised puppets at us from somewhere than have to come looking into Jesus’s face and having a full-blown fucking existential crisis over all the pre-marital gay shenanigans we partake in.”

“Fuck, okay, fine,” Karkat concedes. He rolls his eyes and pushes a weary hand through his hair. “But you do it. I'm too crippled by issues.” 

After turning the son of God face down, Dave shimmies his way down Karkat’s rickety single bed and resolutely does not think of the other problem, the other person somewhere in the room with them. He distracts himself with a healthy mouthful of dick and wishes he had more to show of their hidden little ‘relationship’ than the finite marks of Karkat’s fingernails in the back of his head, pressing in with surprising sharpness like tiny crescent blades into the skin.

Karkat comes breathing the name of a ghost, eyes squeezed shut and hands in the figment hair of someone else. Dave’s dick is still stupidly hard (he’s beginning to think he’s a masochist for even just agreeing to this whole terrible set-up) but when Karkat reaches for him saying, “Fair’s fair,” he waves him off and says he thinks he should probably head home. 

He really does think so. He doesn’t want to look pathetic _and_ projectile vomit in front of Jesus.


	4. Meenah and Aranea

Death is, in a weird way, the best thing to ever happen to Meenah. Mostly because it happens to her friends too - alright, mostly because her incredibly badass kamikaze included killing everyone she knew, too, but now they have the afterlife together and the afterlife, compared to the pain in the ass quest that consumed the beforelife, is a pretty sweet fucking deal.

“We weren’t close then,” Aranea says. She holds her legs to herself while they sit together on the grass in their new little world, and Meenah has been watching the exposed section of her thighs grow and grow, the blue edge of her dress sliding gradually lower while she gave some lecture on human’s fucking with their freaky little meat sticks, or some boring shit Meenah blocked out entirely.

Her eyes stay fixed to it, that mean, smug grey expanse of skin. Aranea’s skin looks nice, soft, her curves are killer. She does this weirdly endearing thing sometimes when she thinks nobody's looking where she adjusts her admittedly huge boobs by shimmying around the collar of her dress. Meenah’s weird urges about her have took a sudden climb into purely physical into just plain flushed, and although it would do nothing for her rep to date the village bore, she still wants to spend all her long dead days with her, anyway, and kiss her stupid pretty mouth shut for a while whenever she drags them both into a lengthy tangent.

“‘Cause, no oarfence, but you were kinda lame as hell back then,” Meenah explains. Aranea’s plump lips curve into a smile, chest rises and falls in a strangely arousing laugh, and Meenah thinks of all the years she missed out on all this, all those years she spent alone, all those years alive, treating Aranea with nothing but an eye-roll and a snidey remark to whoever was on her left.

Aranea turns to face her, and Meenah quickly pretends she wasn’t engaging in any lecherous looks behind her steamed up goggles. The sunshine makes the white of Aranea’s eyes gleam. “I’m glad you changed your mind."

And, as far as signals go, Meenah’s pretty sure that’s the verbal equivalent of Aranea removing her underwear and dropping herself nook-first onto Meenah’s awaiting bulge and leans in, encouraged, lips catching the skin of Aranea’s soft cheek when she turns away again.

Oh. Shit.

“I’m reely sorry, Meenah,” she says, and the pun is there, Meenah _knows_ it’s there. She looks at the black shape of Aranea’s mouth and feels kind of stupid and crestfallen and totally fucking flushed. “It’s not a good time for me to be involving myself in any quadrants.”

“Seems like the best time, to me.” She’s trying not to sound embarrassed or bitter. She just sounds kind of desperate instead. Her shoulders feel heavy when she shrugs them, but this new thing they’ve got between them is fun enough, she tells herself. Ten other losers to bang out there. Eleven, if she’s counting little Serket.

Really, she’s still just counting one. The loser next to her who puts their hands together on the grass and gives her a smile, the one who makes her feel more alive than she did when she actually _was_.


	5. Dirk and Jake

Squarewave is on the fritz. Unsurprising, since he was the first thing Dirk ever built; and now he’s in the corner, no longer trembling with electric convulsions or spitting out any kind of sweet jams. Dead, really. 

When Dirk hauls him up to the roof and pries him open to see what’s wrong inside, it turns out that it was sort of _everything_ that went wrong, all at once. 

No sweat. He’s an expert on resurrection and robotics.

His hands are black with oil and cut with the tips of screws and the sharp edges of steel panels when Jake suddenly joins. The clumsy way he lopes across the roof in his effort to be stealthy gives him off every time, and Dirk doesn’t even look up at the sound of his thick-soled boots across the concrete. There’s a strange feeling he wills out of existence - that embarrassingly pleased swoop in his stomach, the one that reminds him he’s a fucking idiot for liking Jake - still, _still_ liking Jake.

“Blew a gasket, did he?” Jake says, and he’s standing at a ninety degree angle, hands clasped behind his back, looking wide-eyed at Dirk’s black and red hands fumbling with Squarewave’s open chestplate. 

Dirk doesn’t even need to look at him to know it.

He feels tense, chest tight, throat stuck around something. He’s stuck, always stuck when it comes to Jake, and Jake never makes it easy with the enthusiastic, bumbling way he attempts to force them back into friendship. Never was as much of an idiot over Dirk as Dirk was (is) for him.

“Jake,” Dirk warns, lowly. He knows all the signals when Jake is nervous: fidgety hands, big teeth pressing his bottom lip white, bobbing adam’s apple. His fingers tighten around a blue wire from the circuit board in Squarewave’s chest and he has a brief, odd impulse to yank it all the way out. “You shouldn’t be here.”

For a silent moment, Jake seems to consider this behind him. The sun is out, reflecting off of Squarewave’s metal skin, heating up his sunglasses and sticking him to his shirt. He knows with exactly, exactly how Jake looks in the sunlight. 

“You’re my best friend,” Jake says, quietly, which is safer than _I miss you_ , or _I’m lonely_. Dirk feels the same, only multiplied to terrible degrees, and says nothing; Jake sits cross-legged at his back while Dirk works, and when he finally brings Squarewave back to life he still sounds broken, moves brokenly, looks done, and he interrupts the uncertain silence of the night with a slow, robotic-sounding and stuttered, **YO DAWG-G-G, LET’S B-BATTLE**.


	6. Dave and Rose

He’s caught hiding in Can Town at one in the morning after Rose calls out his name from above and then proceeds to fall down the flight of stairs onto his level.

“You war’d me about the stairs,” she slurs, picking herself up, only to knock into half of the carefully crafted town and fall over again. “Y’ _told_ me, dog,” she says into the floor.

“I think you’ve fallen down enough stairs by now that the joke is dead,” Dave tells her, reluctantly standing in the middle of the crayon-green park and moving to help her up, taking her (distractingly warm) hand and trying to manage her completely unsteady body. “It’s been massacred. All that was left of it were bloody little pieces of Comic Sans. It’s fucking tragic, what you’ve done to my work of comedic genius.”

She makes this weird snorting sound then laughs, and keeps laughing, and slings an arm around Dave’s shoulder when she almost topples over again. (They’re the same height. She has the same freckles as he does, a smaller nose, big shapely girl lips. There are still enough similarities that Dave can try convincing himself it’s some fucked up narcissist thing and not - the other thing.)

“You’re _sooo_ funny,” she compliments, her eyes unfocused and smile massive. “‘V’ryone on this meteor is _sooo_ hilarious. You, Karkat, the Mayo, and Kanana is like - she’s just _sooo. Sooo_.”

God, just drown him in the guilt. Kanaya is a cool chick, Dave totally digs her, totally thinks she’s good for Rose and can handle her in ways he fundamentally cannot (hence him hiding away every time she comes drunkenly looking for him). She’s smarter, definitely. It’s not jealousy (although sometimes Dave feels stupidly cheated for not being a girl - like that’d give him a better shot with his own fucking twin sister, christ).

And, on time as always, Rose begins to nuzzle into his neck, hug him. She’s a disturbingly affectionate drunk and completely sold on their new siblinghood. Dave, who politely angles his hips away in case he pops a boner, is not.

“You died with me,” she sing-songs, and Dave’s cautious grip on her waist tightens - his insides seem to convulse, heart clenching in on itself and insides coming away tangled and tight. She smells like lavender and even cock-eyed with her mouth hung open he thinks he’d probably do anything for her. Dying was nothing, really.

“You are a human disaster,” he says, (which really means ‘I am a human disaster’ in that odd way he thinks of himself in his head). He lets her touch the tips of their noses together, squeeze and latch to him for support, and when she suddenly collapses onto him and begins to snore, he sighs into her hair and then lifts her back up the stairs again.


End file.
